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By Ezekiel J. Emanuel and Michael T. Osterholm

Dr. Emanuel is a physician, vice president of initiatives, and professor of medical ethics and fitness policy at the University of Pennsylvania. Osterholm is an epidemiologist and director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota.

As the Winter Olympics system and some 3,000 athletes, their suites and media converge in and around Beijing, the Chinese government has made extraordinary efforts to prevent the 24th edition of the games from becoming a major Covid-spreading event.

Although athletes and coaches will want to get vaccinated, they will face serious restrictions. Those who take advantage of a medical exemption from vaccination must remain in quarantine for 21 days after entering the country. Even other vaccinated people will need to have two negative tests. Olympic participants will be required to pass daily Covid tests and will be confined in an Olympic bubble where they will be confined to prevent it from spreading to the local population.

These excessive measures are in line with China’s Covid 0 policy. President Xi Jinping and his government look like the country can be cordoned off until the virus is wiped out of the world.

But this purpose is with the highly transmissible variant of Omicron and has put the country at risk. The coronavirus is not going away, the world will have to live with it. Worse, Chinese vaccines are much less effective than Omicron. The medical formula is simply not provided to treat millions of other people with health problems with the virus.

Yes, China has weathered the pandemic well so far. Even with a population 4 times that of the United States, China has fewer than 140,000 cases of covid and fewer than 6,000 deaths since January 2020, according to the World Health Organization. A giant most of the factories continued to operate. At the beginning of the pandemic, China added thousands of hospital beds to its fitness formula in a matter of days.

It all turns out to be a great achievement compared to the disorderly and chaotic reaction to the virus in the United States, where more than 860,000 people have died and some 2,000 more die every day. Many hospitals are under siege. The economy has been disrupted.

But this may very well be the long term facing China. Your search for 0 Covid will turn out to be a big mistake. Politics has left him completely off guard for what will be endemic to Covid.

Recent studies show that Chinese vaccines offer limited coverage compared to Omicron, even protecting other people from severe headaches and Death from Covid. This means that vaccines do not provide good enough protective immunity for a population that does not have natural immunity against infection.

For those who are infected, China’s fitness formula has limited outpatient medical services or home care. house. And if millions of other people want care, even if they don’t want to be hospitalized, hospitals will be temporarily overwhelmed. Hospitals can also become sites of widespread events. In the picture, Chinese hospitals fear that the virus will refuse care to those who want it.

In the next few years, most people around the world, including China, will likely be exposed to the coronavirus. With an incubation time potentially as short as 3 days and many other asymptomatic people swollen, the virus will spread rapidly. Once an outbreak is identified, it will have moved into the city.

We can begin to see the long term in many Chinese cities, mainly in Xi’an, more than six hundred miles from Beijing. Last month, the government locked up xi’an’s other thirteen million people in reaction to a small outbreak of the Delta variant, which is less transmissible than Omicron. This strict confinement lasted about 3 weeks. It has also spread to Tianjin, a city near Beijing. Alarmingly, epidemiological studies on a significant number of other people infected with Omicron in Tianjin revealed that approximately 95% of them had been fully vaccinated with Chinese vaccines. And on Jan. 15, Chinese officials said the first case of the Omicron variant had been discovered in Beijing, prompting a localized blockade and mass testing.

This maximum spread is likely to make President Xi and China’s leaders shudder. Reflexively, they are likely to squeeze harder. But a 0 Covid policy means that the Chinese will pursue an ever-changing goal. And they will never win. Inevitably, this will have serious economic repercussions for China, and for all of us, given the country’s position in the global economy. Although China remains the production capital of the world, it is probably not sustainable if blockades occur. China’s doorsteps are very likely to be increasingly reluctant to marry Chinese companies when they are unable to enter the country to reunite with their spouses and inspect factories facing unpredictable closures. Declining Chinese production would disrupt supply chains and the availability of goods everywhere. , adding in the United States.

Other countries can provide a roadmap that China can implement. Denmark, Germany and some other European countries, as well as Australia, have achieved maximum immunity without suffering the American death rate. They have used effective vaccines, made smarter decisions about when and where to impose blockades, and protect the most vulnerable: the elderly and those with weakened immune systems. The result was community spread, but it would have been inevitable, even with longer or more severe shutdowns, and this allowed those countries to regain their immunity.

China’s elaborate containment efforts planned for the Olympics may prevent it from a Covid outbreak, and we hope so. But a zero-covid policy is a long-term waste strategy.

Ezekiel J. Emanuel (@ZekeEmanuel) is a physician, vice president of initiatives, and professor of medical ethics and fitness policy at the University of Pennsylvania. Michael T. Osterholm (@mtosterholm) is an epidemiologist and director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota.

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